People who give, live longer, ISR study shows

By Diane SwanbrowNews Service

For older adults, it really is better to
give than to receive, a U-M study suggests. The study, to be published
in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, finds that older people
who are helpful to others reduce their risk of dying by nearly 60 percent
compared to peers who provide neither practical help nor emotional support
to relatives, neighbors or friends.

"Making a contribution to the lives of other people may help to
extend our own lives," says the paper's lead author, Stephanie Brown,
a psychologist at the Institute for Social Research (ISR).

For the study, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health,
Brown analyzed data on 423 older couples, part of the ISR Changing Lives
of Older Couples Study. That study was a random community-based sample
of people who were first interviewed in 1987 then followed for five years
to see how they coped with the inevitable changes of later life.

During the first set of interviews, the husbands and wives were asked
a series of questions about whether they provided any practical support
to friends, neighbors or relatives, including help with housework, childcare,
errands or transportation. They also were asked how much they could count
on help from friends or family members if they needed it. Finally, they
were asked about giving emotional support to or receiving it from their
spouses, including being willing to listen if the spouse needed to talk.

Over the five-year period of the study, 134
people died. In her analysis of the link between giving
and receiving help and mortality, Brown controlled for
a variety of factors, including age, gender, and
physical and emotional health. "I wanted to rule out
the possibilities that older people give less and are
more likely to die, that females give more and are
less likely to die, and that people who are depressed or
in poor health are both less likely to be able to
help others and more likely to die," Brown says.

She found that people who reported providing
no help to others were more than twice as likely to
die as people who gave some help to others.
Overall, Brown found that 75 percent of men and 72
percent of women reported providing some help without
pay to friends, relatives or neighbors in the year
before they were surveyed.

Receiving help from others was not linked to a reduced risk of mortality,
however. "If giving, rather than receiving, promotes longevity, then
interventions that are designed to help people feel supported may need
to be redesigned so the emphasis is on what people can do to help others,"
Brown says. "In other words, these findings suggest that it isn't
what we get from relationships that makes contact with others so
beneficial; it's what we give."

The results, she notes, are consistent with the
possibility that the benefits of social contact are
shaped, in part, by the evolutionary advantages of
helping others. "Older adults may still be able to
increase their fitness (defined as the reproductive success
of individuals who share their genes) by becoming
motivated to stay alive and prolonging the amount
of time they can contribute to family members,"
she notes. "Of course, this possibility relies on the
assumption that a motivation for self-preservation
can influence mortality. And in fact, there is evidence
to suggest that individuals with a 'fighting spirit'
survive longer with cancer than individuals who
feel helpless or less optimistic about their chances
for survival. Now it seems that the same may be true
of a 'giving spirit.'"